Paul Gallant and Jim Mudd talk with former member of The Walking Dead and current cast member on Showtime’s Masters of Sex about her shows, her future with music and the new spin off of “Fear the Walking Dead.”
Kinney was killed off the Walking Dead last season as her character Beth was shot in the head (No we didn’t say spoiler alert, IT’S THE NAME OF THE PODCAST!)

“I was sad to leave the show,” Kinney told Spoiler Alert. “I worked on the show for about four years or four seasons. I’d seen (Beth) grow seen her change. There are a lot of parts of me that are like Beth.

“The fans of Walking Dead are so incredible and it really was such a ride, it was such a journey for me. I’ve never been part of something that had such a reach.”

Starting August 23rd on AMC the first season of The Walking Dead spinoff/prequel “Fear The Walking Dead” takes a look at Los Angeles as the zombie outbreak begins. Kinney is excited for the show, even though we don’t think Beth would pop up in LA at all.

“Someone pitch it,” Kinney said of having Beth on Fear The Walking Dead. “Maybe she went to LA for a music audition or something.”

Kinney is now appearing on Showtimes “Masters Of Sex” which is a different animal to be in than The Walking Dead.

“Very different from Walking Dead,” Kinney said. “To me that definately appealed to me. I loved working on Walking Dead but i sort of liked the idea to of going to work and, like, people not getting shot in the throat. To me I welcomed the break of not necessarily exploring people getting torn apart but instead exploring relationships and sex and drama and people falling in love.”

Actress discusses new indie-pop effort, ‘This Is War,’ as well as playing a “sex surrogate” on ‘Masters of Sex’

Toward the end of last year, a part of actress Emily Kinney died. For four seasons, she had played The Walking Dead’s Beth Greene — the wide-eyed, singing-prone, optimistic daughter of a veterinarian farmer — but as is the show’s wont, her character met its less-than-natural conclusion in November.

Now Kinney is focusing on new roles, with appearances slated on Masters of Sex and The Knick, and a new album. For the past four years, the actress has been recording and releasing albums of emotive indie-pop on her own and has a new one — This Is War — slated to come out on October 2nd. She made the album knowing full well that after her run on one of TV’s biggest recent hits, it would be reaching a wider audience, but she didn’t let expectations faze her. Today, she’s premiering a new tune from the upcoming LP, “Birthday Cake,” which continues in the autobiographical, relationship-themed mold of songs from her prior release, 2014’s Expired Love.

Soft and acoustic, “Birthday Cake” finds Kinney singing to a man she’s crushing on and tells of how they eventually attempt a long-distance relationship after a romantic encounter at her birthday party, moving from making out to making love by the time he visits her in New York City. Kinney tells Rolling Stone that the reason it sounds so sweet and hopeful is because it’s based on a true story.

“I wrote it after I’d gone on a date with this guy I liked and I said, ‘Well, come to my birthday party,” she says with a laugh. “He couldn’t come until late, after my friends and I had gone to this bar, but then later I lured him back to my friend’s apartment. I said, ‘You know, there’s still leftover birthday cake at the apartment, so you might want to…’ So he came over to have some birthday cake and then we fell in love.” She laughs and says that shortly thereafter she had to fly to Georgia to film The Walking Dead, so they tried out a long-distance relationship. When Rolling Stone asks if it worked out, she says with a laugh, “In some ways it worked.”

By her own admission, the tune is one of the more cheerful songs on This Is War. As she wrote the record — whose cover sports her face and the album title written on sticker-covered xylophone keys (“It’s, like, a cute war,” she says) — she constantly found herself in the middle of all sorts of situations, which led to tension in the songs. “The songs are me figuring stuff out,” she says. “The title is about stepping up and standing up for myself, in relationships and in my work. Between auditioning and music, it can be tough. There are a lot of ups and downs.”

Expired Love is Emily Kinney's second EP. Like Blue Toothbrush, it explores themes of love and lost relationships through quirky, relatable songwriting, but it presents a more polished and mature sound. With the release of Expired Love, Kinney fully realizes her musical identity and firmly establishes herself in the indie-pop world. The EP will be re-released on March 18, 2014 featuring two additional songs.